Since the most offhand or intimate actions have become entertainment on reality television, the TV lens has lost what used to be its biggest asset: its power as a visual lie detector. These days, whether you're watching politicians or contestants for a dream date, you can't help wondering about the hidden agendas behind their presentations to the camera.
With formality and restraint, the makers of Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary have restored the persuasiveness of videotaped testimony. They do little more than edit down 10 hours of dead-on interviews conducted in 2001 with Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's private secretaries from 1942 to 1945. (They also intercut her recollections with Junge herself watching the footage and occasionally elaborating on a point.) The camera stays at one remove; the soundtrack is silent except for Junge's voice. She speaks in German; the filmmakers provide English subtitles.
Their accomplishment is enormous. Patiently taking in Junge's eyewitness account of Hitler's inner circle without any prodding or embellishment, Andre Heller (who conducted the interviews) and Othmar Schmiderer (who worked the sound and camera) respect her attempt to grapple with heretofore unspoken truths. They allow her the dignity of coming to her own realizations.
Depicting Adolf Eichmann as a bureaucrat of atrocity, the philosopher Hannah Arendt located "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us" as "the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." Without diminishing Eichmann's responsibility for crimes against humanity, she explained how mundane, "rational" routines protected him and men like him from confronting the horror that they generated. But "the banality of evil" has itself become banal. Too many historians and dramatists exploit the concept to lend a patina of meaning to any portraits of totalitarian regimes, including sketches of civilians clinging to normality as their government enacts genocide.
Without any special pleading, this spoken memoir of a sheltered Bavarian girl brings home what artists and intellectuals often reduce to "banality" but is actually the complex, booby-trapped meshwork of everyday life. When Junge took her job with Hitler, she escaped the constrictions of living with a divorced mother slaving for a tyrannical grandfather. She was ripe to see Hitler as a Fuhrer-Knows-Best figure. Yet Junge doesn't forgive herself for youthful neediness and naivete. As the movie goes on, she displays a gnawing urge to understand her own obliviousness and complicity in a horrifying regime.
